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By Aiden Taylor, 11 Dec 2015Features

The best weird, scary and jaw-dropping ‘WTF’ moments from burnouts and drag racing in 2015

We’ve trawled the Internet and the Street Machine archives to dig up the best weird, scary and jaw-dropping ‘WTF’ moments from burnouts and drag racing in 2015

MICHAEL Silk’s Nissan SR20-powered Datsun 1200 wagon loves to lift its nose in the air, as it was happy to demonstrate at the APSA Pro Street Finals in Sydney earlier this year. After a few seconds spooling up the turbo, it picked up the front wheels and launched straight into the other lane with the bumper dragging along the strip. Michael was lucky to keep the car out of the wall, and even luckier the bloke in the other lane was already halfway down the track when he took flight!

THIS was a scary moment for Peter Donchos at the Melbourne Jamboree at Calder Park. After dropping fluid on his tyres during his burnout, the 13B rotary-powered Mazda 1300 wagon came loose as he backed off the throttle and rolled over! The whole event almost seemed to happen in slow motion, but fortunately Peter walked away from the accident unharmed.

WE CAN’T help but feel sorry for this guy. He’d only had his shiny new Mustang for a week before he strapped it to a dyno at a US car event to see how many ponies it was packing. When the car got up to around 150mph (top of fifth – nobody knows why the driver went through the gears) the rear left tyre exploded, destroying the whole back end of the car!

HERE’S another dyno explosion, but this one is of a slightly less costly nature. At Summernats 28 earlier this year, Jake Edwards’s Torana made 2025rwhp on the dyno – but not without blowing a turbo to smithereens! A turbine wheel let go, and if you look closely at the video you can see it get blown out of the exhaust.

WE’RE still waiting very patiently for our new 2015 Ford Mustangs, but over in America they’re running them into walls at drag strips! This car was a 5.0-litre GT with an aftermarket supercharger installed, and the owner was racing on an unprepped track, which turned out to be very slippery. Fortunately the driver wasn’t hurt – well, apart from his ego.

JAMES North and his FRYZEM Torana have given us plenty of wild and fiery burnouts over the years, but this fire at Tread Cemetery earlier in the year was a real barbeque. “It melted one of the oil lines,” James said afterwards. “It doesn’t take much when you’ve got 100psi and hot oil spraying everywhere. I’ve had big fires like that before, but I think my passenger got a bit of a shock.”

HERE’S another wacky one from this year’s Tread Cemetery. Peter Grmusa lost the nut off his top ball joint before this burnout and it separated when he tipped in. It was one of the weirder things we’ve seen happen at a burnout event, but it didn’t stop Peter from giving it a good crack. He reckons he only realised something was wrong when he couldn’t go where he wanted to!

THERE are burnout fires and then there’s this burnout fire from Tony De Oliveira’s YLDTOY, which is easily one of the most terrifying we’ve seen this year. It all started pretty normally, until the transmission blew and flames engulfed the whole car! “My first thought was: ‘Holy shit, don’t get out of the car!’” Tony says. “But my mate Rodney had already opened the door and fire came inside.” Tony and Rodney had no choice but to bail out the driver’s side through a pool of burnout trans fluid. Tony escaped without harm, but Rodney copped first-degree burns to his leg. Fortunately he made a speedy recovery.

KNOWN as the worst wall hit ever at the Perth Motorplex, this is one stack Aaron James won’t be forgetting anytime soon! “The damage was too much to fix,” he says. “So I stripped the ute and the shell went off to a scrap-metal yard, while the ute’s motor, gearbox, trans cooler, diff, coil-overs, fuel cell and fuel pumps went into my VX SS sedan.”

IF AARON’S wall hit is the worst ever at the ’Plex, this one has to be a close second. A burst brake line meant GOINNUTZ had no brakes when it tipped in, causing it to smash into the wall. But as they say, ‘when in doubt, power out’, and that’s exactly what this driver did, only to the hit the wall again, just to finish off that rear end.